Bayswater's Find of the Week on the Used Book Floor Blog

Thursday, August 24, 2017

We shelve books of all genres on our used book
floor, but without a doubt, the books that provide the most interesting finds
for us have been found in the cooking section.
People seem to feel that cookbooks are a good place to jot down notes or
tuck in newspaper articles. Really - check
out the cookbooks on your shelves some rainy day and see what we mean. Cookbooks
are clearly windows to our souls.

This
week’s find on the used book floor was discovered in…you guessed it, a
cookbook! Published in 1929, the
“Rumford Complete Cookbook” was put together by the Department of Home
Economics of the Rumford Chemical Company in Providence, R.I. We know you are thinking it, so we’re just
going to put it right out there…a chemical company that puts together a
cookbook? Interesting.

Taped to
the back cover of the book is a newspaper recipe clipping from 1955 for the
Eisenhower Chocolate Cake. This was not
just any chocolate cake, we discovered. Upon
doing a little research we found that during his first year in office, Hershey
hosted a giant 63rd birthday party for President Eisenhower and
constructed a cake that was 9 feet wide and 6 feet tall. This gigantic chocolate confection was made
mostly of plywood and paper mache, but there was a very small portion of it
that was actual cake created specifically for Eisenhower in honor of his
birthday. Only the President and his
wife were allowed to eat from that cake, as the 600 other guests dined on
alternate confections. It was during
this celebration that the Eisenhower Chocolate Cake was born and the recipe
became a hot commodity. It, therefore,
makes sense that the woman who owned this cookbook 62 years ago would have
considered the Eisenhower Chocolate Cake recipe newspaper clipping to be a
“must have” in her cookbook. Who knew? We included a picture of the recipe in case
you want to try your hand at it, too.

The Eisenhower Chocolate Cake recipe is only
one of many newspaper clippings that we found pasted into the “Rumford Complete
Cookbook” and the cookbook (complete with finds) is for sale here at Bayswater
for the price of $19.99, as it was published in 1929. To catch up with our previous finds of the
week from the used book floor, you can always check us out at
bayswaterbooks.com and on facebook, or stop by the store in Center Harbor and
check out the used book floor for yourself!

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Our most recent find of the week on the used book
floor is a true blast from the past in so many ways. Tucked into a 1964 paperback copy of the
novel “In Vivo” was a letter written and mailed in December of 1968 from a
mother in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to her son and his wife in Niantic,
Connecticut.

Before we
get to the letter inside the book, however, we found that the book, itself, is
somewhat of a find, as it is a historical novel that deals with (what was then)
the relatively new discovery and use of antibiotics in the medical field. More effective strains of antibiotics were
discovered in the 1960s, the time period during which “In Vivo” was written. How interesting would it be to read a novel
today that was based on the “new” and “uncharted” discovery of antibiotics by
characters back then? The book’s 1964
reviewers couldn’t seem to put the “exciting” book down, they stated. Ahh, progress.

But, back
to the letter. It appears to have been
written just after the son and his wife were visiting their parents/in-laws on
3½ Elliot Street in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Yes, you read correctly – 3½ Elliot Street. Why the half, you may ask? We wondered, too. Apparently, in older cities in New England,
the street numbers were given out consecutively, without skipping numbers to
allow for future buildings to be constructed.
As a result, ½ and even ¼ street addresses were later assigned to new
structures. That sounds like something
right out of Harry Potter to us.

The
mother wrote to her son about how she finally sold her all of her Bates stock
(from the Bates Worldwide advertising and marketing company) at $19 a share
after having bought a great deal of it in the mid 1940s – only a handful of
years after the company was founded. She
stated that as a “staunch New Englander” she hated to risk selling it at a
loss, so she got nervous and got rid of the stock when she saw the price rise
above $17 a share – what she purchased it for.
Little did she know that Bates Worldwide, whose future clients would include
M&Ms, Nabisco, Colgate and Palmolive (just to name a few) would prove to be
a powerhouse in the world of advertising and their profits exploded in the 70s
and 80s. Too bad. Makes you wonder what her investment would
have turned into had she not sold the stock in the 1960s. We will never know.

As with
all of our used books that we feature here at Bayswater, “In Vivo” can be yours
for the price of $2.99. To catch up with
our previous finds of the week from the used book floor, you can always check
us out at bayswaterbooks.com and on facebook, or stop by the store in Center
Harbor and check out the used book floor for yourself!

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Do you ever watch the police procedural (or
detective) shows on TV? You know, the
ones where the investigator asks the potential suspects where they were and
what was happening on a particular date?
Unless the date in question was very recent, who really remembers details like that? Our latest find of the week on the used book
floor allowed us to do a little research regarding one particular date –
January 25, 1980 – and what one man may have been experiencing on that day.

This week’s
discovery was a Long Island Railroad ticket from Friday, January 25, 1980,
tucked into a copy of Stuart Woods’ book, “Standup Guy”. The ticket was purchased by a male and it is
clear by the number of punches on it that the ticket was used for commuting to
and from work during the week of January 20-25 in 1980. Hmm…we wondered, what was happening during
that time in the life of a Brooklyn, New York commuter?

On that
day, we surmise that the commuter could have been trying to catch a brief cat nap, as Super
Bowl XIV had recently concluded and he may have been shouting at the TV until a
late hour, perhaps lamenting that neither New York NFL team even made
the playoffs that year (the Pittsburg Steelers won and QB Terry Bradshaw was
named the MVP). As he sat on the subway,
maybe he read about how President Jimmy Carter announced a United States
boycott of the Moscow Olympics to be held that summer. Perhaps he was looking out the window and
thinking about the economy and his own job security, as inflation had
skyrocketed to 13.5% (it is now 2.9%) and would eventually lead to a recession
in the early 1980s. Or maybe, because it
was Friday, he simply couldn’t wait for the weekend (even a cold January one in
New York).

Whatever he may have been thinking or reading
about, we found that on that day in 1980, a New York Long Island Railroad
ticket cost a total of .60 cents. If the
man commuted five days a week for a total of 20 weekdays in a month, he spent
$12 a month on his subway pass. To put
that in perspective, if one were to purchase a ticket for the same amount of time
in that subway system now, it would cost $103 (a good example of
inflation).

As with
all of our used books that we feature here at Bayswater, “Standup Guy” can be
yours for the price of $2.99. To catch
up with our previous finds of the week from the used book floor, you can always
check us out at bayswaterbooks.com and on facebook, or stop by the store in
Center Harbor and check out the used book floor for yourself!

Thursday, August 3, 2017

We have all probably finished a book and passed it
on to someone else at least once or twice in our lifetime, but who can remember
which book we gave to whom, and how long ago?
Thanks to this week’s find on the used book floor here at Bayswater, we
can answer that question – at least for ten men in the year 1947.

In a 1946
hardcover copy of Thunder Out of China, we
found a list of the New Hampshire YMCA Reading Circle from 1947. What was a reading circle, you may ask? Was it similar to a knitting or quilting
circle, where individuals gathered together to knit/quilt/work on individual
projects while they visited? The answer,
at least in 1947 in NH, was no. A
reading circle featured a book that was purchased and passed on, one month at a
time, to each member. The member was
granted one month to read the title and on the first day of the following
month, read or not, the individual was required to mail it to the next person
on the reading list. The names of all
ten men, their addresses, and the month that the book was to be in their
possession are listed on a card inside of the book.

At that
time, the reading circle consisted of men who lived throughout the state of NH
in the towns of Littleton, Dover, Lakeport, Lisbon, Keene, Nashua and Center
Conway. The circle started out with
Andrew in Keene for the month of September, followed by John in Dover for the month
of October, and so on, until it ended up back at the State YMCA in Concord (now
simply referred to as the Concord YMCA) in July of 1948. In
short, this book was read and shipped from person to person across the state roughly 70 years ago! Might we also add (gleaned
from the bold typing in all caps not so subtly reminding all members of the
need for promptness) that we think one would not have wanted to be late in
sending the book on in this circle.
After all, Hugh from Nashua, Roger from Center Conway, or Charles from
Littleton, should they be waiting on the book from you, had your name and
address.

As with
all of our used books that we feature here at Bayswater, Thunder Out of China can be yours for the price of $7, (complete
with the 1947 NH reading circle find). To
catch up with our previous finds of the week from the used book floor, you can
always check us out at bayswaterbooks.com and on facebook.